


You Don’t Have A Clue

by sageofchaos



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Crying, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-02
Updated: 2016-12-02
Packaged: 2018-09-06 01:56:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8730157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sageofchaos/pseuds/sageofchaos
Summary: "He laughed thoroughly.  'Come on!  Thick as thieves now, we are.'  His leg scraped, towards her, and she could tell that he was looming over her.  He smelled like the salty air that hung around Gibraltar, and like old leather.  He’d probably throw his arm around her shoulders, if he could figure out exactly where she was.  His warm breath was at her hair.  'No need to get all shy.'There was no helping it.  She was going to die, being so close to him in this dark room."





	

She cried, alone in the corner of the supply office. 

The pitch black helped. Without the light, she wouldn’t see any unfortunate reflections of herself in the metal walls or empty monitors, and she couldn’t see her trembling hands. She had taken off her glasses, so she could freely brush her balled fists against her eyes and cheeks, and try to wipe away her tears as they came. She couldn’t do this in her room because Hana, and maybe even Lena and Angela at this rate, would look for her there. She could stew in her embarrassment, and shame, and all the other feelings that picked her up and shook her thoroughly now.

But someone did find her. A loud, metallic knock at the doorway, and then the sound of the storage unit’s door lifting open. She put her glasses on and, while still sitting on the cold floor, peeked around the crates she hid behind, to the dark silhouette that stood there. The red light of the setting sun surrounded a tall, lanky man. 

“Oh no,” she whispered. 

“I saw ya scamper in here.” She could hear the scrape of his fake leg against the floor, near the doorway. “And I know you ain’t left, cause I haven’t had the chance to blast a secret passage into here yet.”

Mei stared, watching the man mill around the doorway, craning, looking around for any sign of her. But it was too dark for him to properly see anything. His hand started to reach for the light switch-

“Jamison! Wait.” She pressed her hands over her chest, as if to steady her lungs. “I am here. I was just looking for something.” 

“Looking for something in the pitch dark?” 

Mei squeezed her eyes shut. Why was he here? Why couldn’t he just leave? Anyone else, she would just get up and barge out, and find another place to hide in. Give them a piece of her mind if they tried to pry. But if nothing else mattered in the world right now, at the very least, she couldn’t let this man see her cry. 

“Hoi?” he called again. Jamison was peering in her direction, obviously trying to seek her out based on where he heard her voice. She couldn’t make out his face, not with the sun behind him. That was good.

“I wanted to be alone. Please close the door behind you.” She turned her back to him, and hid completely behind her crate again. “And please, do not touch the light switch.” 

He mumbled something, but she couldn’t hear it. Soon, the sunlight disappeared from the room, and it was totally dark again. Amazingly, the door had shut, and the lights remained off. She heard nothing. He must have left, thank god. Just at the moment she had some hope of being able to leave unharassed, of being able to dry her eyes before going outside again, she heard the metal-to-concrete scraping again. 

“What’s next?” Jamison asked. “I could yell a good ‘MARCO’ for you.” 

She clapped her hands over her ears, and tried to tune him out. What a dense man. She should have outright told him to leave! Maybe he still would get bored and go, if she ignored him long enough. But even with noises muffled, it wasn’t long until she heard a stack of supplies topple over. Within the plastic crates, she could hear glass breaking. 

“Oi!” he yelped, and given the sudden clap of his feet against the ground, he must have jumped backwards. “Well. I wonder how much a mess I could make just walking into things. Hard mode, as they say.”

She grit her teeth together, took one more pass at drying her eyes, and then spoke clearly. “Please, stay still! I am coming.” She pushed herself up with her hands, and propelled herself forward. She knew this place well enough to navigate it blind. This was the storeroom she and Winston shared for their respective research projects, after all. And she would definitely not be able to explain to the lunar scientist why his room had filled with broken flasks.

Mei could hear the scrape of the intruder’s foot very closeby, somewhere just ahead of her. She half-expected to see fiery strands of hair illuminated in the dark, and maybe they would have been there any another time. But today, Jamison hadn’t had the chance to blow up anything. Hana had dragged him off to a job in town, and so the typical chorus of explosions in the makeshift laboratory Winston set up for him were not to be heard all day.

Mei pressed her fists against her hips, and planted her feet. “Why are you here?” 

“I had to find you! Cause you gave me ‘bout the best laugh I’d had in _months_!” His voice was so bright and thrilled, it nearly cracked electric. “I’d come sooner, but I was doubled over! Couldn’t move. Basically face to the asphalt. Pigface thought my’d heart give out.” 

She huffed in a deep breath. “Sorry that you were so indisposed.” 

“And I’d have died happy! Did you _see_ Dust n’ Rust? He couldn’t move!” Mei could feel small wafts of air at the sides of her face – he was probably wildly throwing his hands about. “He looked like he was whacked sideways with the Dumb Hammer, even a good five minutes after you’d finished laying into him.”

“Jamison, please…” 

“Like his own mum crawled out of the grave and spanked him!” 

“I am very sorry that I yelled at McCree like that.” Mei wrenched at the hem of her shirt. “Please do not treat what I did as a good thing. I am going to have to apologize to him.” 

“That was a perfectly good thrashing! Why would you apologize?” 

That morning, Hana made a big deal of the important, tactical meeting she had in the city. Since she was one of the top soldiers at Overwatch, she got to recruit whoever she wanted to accompany her. Virtually anybody else on the base would have been a more subtle companion the mission, but she had forced Jamison to go with her. Mei had rolled her eyes when she heard, and knew that Hana just wanted to bring along someone who would enable her sweet tooth. She was in her lab when they left, with an eye on her communicator in case something went wrong, and Hana needed back-up in the city. Nothing happened though, and Mei eventually got lost in her work and forgot.

Just a half hour ago, Mei had been in the loading area, sorting through some newly delivered supplies. Hana and Jamison returned from Gibraltar’s city proper by boat, and had to pass through the loading zone to get back to base proper. McCree, who was on sentry duty, clearly thought that the sight of ol’ crazy Junkrat laced up nice in a clean shirt, jacket, and actually fitting trousers was too funny to let pass without comment.

She sighed at herself. Mei, at that moment, could not let McCree’s opportunistic teasing pass without comment either. Now, she trembled all over with embarrassment, just thinking about how she had lost control of her temper. 

“It was not a good idea.” 

He snorted. “Why should that stop you?” 

“Even if he deserved it, what I did does not only affect him. It might have upset other people too. They might not trust me.” She gazed downward, out of pure habit rather than something to look at. “Hanzo looked _extremely_ unhappy.” The archer’s disapproving face was the last one she saw before she had run off to find a place to hide. 

“Ah.” Jamison’s voice lowered with mock solemnity. “I reckon he’ll never like you again. What a loss.”

He was making light of her again. “It must be easy, not caring what people think about you.” 

“It is. You should give it a spin.” 

Mei crossed her arms, turned her face to the side. “You do not get it. If our group is going to even start saving the world, properly, we have to start by being good to each other.”

“Gotcha. Play nice, all the time. Which is why you lost your pretty little head over ol’ Dust n Rust?” He snickered. Heat rose up around and within her throat, threatening to choke her. 

“That was just...I do not like bullying,” she said, miserably.

“So I’ve heard!” Mei assumed he’d make fun of her, maybe get some revenge for how she used to treat him, but he just seemed pleased with himself. “This is exciting. And here I thought you hated me.”

“I did! Do!” She took a step back, and her hip bumped against a fallen crate. “Do not jump to conclusions!”

“Oi, Roadie takes care of the real bodyguard stuff. But I’ll yell out SNOWFLAKE when someone hurts my feelings, right?” She could very, very easily imagine his devious grin, as if it hung bright like the Chesire Cat’s in the darkness. “And the winter witch will show them which way’s up. Well?”

She covered her face in her hands, even though he couldn’t see her anyway. “Please don’t!”

He laughed thoroughly. “Come on! Thick as thieves now, we are.” His leg scraped, towards her, and she could tell that he was looming over her. He smelled like the salty air that hung around Gibraltar, and like old leather. He’d probably throw his arm around her shoulders, if he could figure out exactly where she was. His warm breath was at her hair. “No need to get all shy.”

There was no helping it. She was going to die, being so close to him in this dark room. 

None of what she felt should have surprised her so badly. Mei knew he had changed since joining Overwatch. He didn’t look as starved as a year ago. He was no longer so defensive around everyone. He teased, still, but people learned to rag back, and he seemed to thrive on the attention. He even teased Zenyatta these days, the kind of teasing that didn’t always include threats of explosions and dismantlement. She knew these things, but she hadn’t let them add up in her mind. Even as teammates, she had always held the Junkrat at a distance, and regarded him as the same as when she first met him – an angry, filthy, lawless man who only felt good when other people were at the butt of his jokes. Even when she had found things to admire in him, she had pushed those thoughts down, promising to think about it later, but never actually doing so.

But just a half hour ago. Hana had come back from Gibraltar with a tall, blonde, punkishly-dressed young man. Mei simply hadn’t recognized the stranger when she first glanced over at the pair, and returned to her work. But then Hana laughed, and his voice had responded. And while Mei watched on in total astonishment, McCree joined in, grilling them and giving Jamison a hard time, and…

“I can tell you why I was upset at McCree,” she conceded. Mei could not help her small, bare voice. “If you’ll leave me alone.” 

His leg clicked, and he seemed to straighten up. “Oh?”

She bit her bottom lip, for a moment, then spoke. “It was your outfit, when you were coming back from the city with Hana.” Mei felt lame as she spoke, technically telling the truth but still omitting so much. 

“The clothes?” She could hear the ‘yuck’ in his tone. “That stuff Froggo put me in? What about it?” 

“It was a nice change.” Lucio had done too good a job, with that leather jacket and all. He had made Jamison look like a proper... _handsome_...young man. Again, now, her throat threatened to close, and she struggled to make it through her words. 

“And I thought, it would be sad if you got discouraged, and did not go back out again.” Mei fought for a breath of air. “So I did not want you to take McCree’s opinion about your clothes seriously.”

He paused. Mei almost wished for the light, to see his face, to see if he had read too much of her heart from her shaky explanation. But in the end, in the darkness between them, he only laughed. “Take him seriously? How _could_ I? He’s the one wearing that red snuggie around his neck everywhere he goes.”

Mei’s eyes went wide. “A…snuggie?” She pressed her hands to her mouth, but he caught her too off-guard, and she couldn't help it. She giggled. 

“See! Even you can’t take him seriously, once you think about that big ol’ blankie.” 

“No! That is rude,” she managed. 

“All to say, ol’ Dust ain’t in a position to tell me how to live my life, which by the way has always been at the height of thrill and style.” His laugh rippled around him, like an aura. “You make a lot out of nothing, mate.” 

She laughed as well, softly, wrapped up in relief and his cheer. Even now, fresh tears rolled down her cheeks. 

What had actually gone through her mind when she had stepped away from her work and snapped at McCree? Just fear. What if the cowboy went too far in his joking? If Jamie’s face darkened, if he found reason to hate and distrust everyone here again, then maybe he'd decide Overwatch wasn’t worth it anymore, no matter what deal they had offered him. He'd break the contract and go on the run again, and without Overwatch’s protection, he'd enter a world even more dangerous than it was just a year ago, with those people still hunting him down, and...

Mei had promised to herself, when she woke up out of that terrible sleep years ago, that she would never, ever lose her friends again. And here in this dark room, Mei had prayed, begged herself that the worry she had for Jamison was a simple extension of that, that she just considered him a friend now, and that she’d feel the same magnitude of loss if Hanzo or Zarya struck out on their own again. She would be sad if they left, of course. But the thought of them didn’t reduce her to hot tears in the corner of a storage closet. 

She rubbed at her cheeks again, until they were dry. She couldn’t do this anymore. She had to be alone, somewhere else, and figure out everything. One of the exits was close by, she thought, and she spread open her fingers and reached for the wall to find the groove of the doorway. 

Her hand brushed against a smooth, but hard surface. It was warm and moved with...Jamison’s breathing. She touched his upper chest, and that jacket. He was still wearing it. 

“Oi?” 

“Sorry!” Mei’s hand shrank back immediately. She wanted to cringe into the very center of the Earth. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to do that. I was just looking…I wanted to find-”

Bright, orange-gold eyes filled her vision. Mei shrieked and stumbled backwards, into the crate behind her. One of his hands grabbed her by the wrist just in time, keeping her from falling over. Jamison laughed as Mei swayed on her feet and fought to rediscover her balance, and her wits.

Where was the light coming from...His thumb! The artificial one. The metal orange fingertip hung off, and a soft, open flame fluttered from it. He held it up between them, so that it flickered and threw the light over his face. His eyes reminded her of the setting sun.

“Go go Junkrat torch,” he mused, stifling an extended laugh. His smiling face was so, so incredibly close, his lips drawn up in a devious smirk. “No sense in fumbling around for a lighter every time you wanna blast something, eh?”

Mei nodded. “That is...very clever.” Her throat and chest burned like fire. He held her wrist still, and his fingers on her skin - they were warm, and he held her surprisingly delicately. Of course he was used to handling sensitive objects. The same thunder that shook her heart earlier that day, when she had recognized him at the loading bay, seized upon her now. 

He leaned in closer. “Like, evil genius clever?

She smiled, trying to look normal, and squeaked out a real response. “More like a Boy Scout. Always prepared!”

His eyes flashed with surprise now. “Don’t insult _me_ now. What happened to you protecting my feelings?”

“Ah.” She laughed, if weakly. “Perhaps I will not be a good bodyguard after all.” 

She hoped he would laugh as well, and then get distracted by something else. Jamison, though, seemed to be suddenly fixated on her. His thumb-lighter waved closer to the side of her face, and he studied her eyes, expression. She could not move at all.

“Huh,” he said. “Yer face is all red.” 

“Uh, is that right?” She slapped her hand to her forehead. “Oh! I think I got a fever.” She pulled her other hand away from his grip, which he gave up freely, and brushed past him and towards the now-visible door. “I am sorry. I have to go.”

Pure puzzlement covered his face, and one of his eyebrows arched high. Perhaps he had something he wanted to ask her, but he didn’t manage to articulate it before she reached the doorway. “You’re a wound up one,” he did say, turning towards her. His real hand was set at his hip now, as he watched her leave. “Come by my shop if you want to wreck something good, you know? Take the edge off.”

He was concerned. Mei wasn’t sure how she knew, except that for a moment her heart hurt, terribly, and she could no longer hold herself together under his searching eyes. She turned her face aside, to the outdoors. “I...I will have to see. Goodbye.” 

Mei was barely out of the doorway before she started running, hoping to get out of his sight before he could see where she went. She couldn’t have him following her again. She made it behind another container, didn’t see him at the doorway, and then darted towards the rocky, hard coast, with every intention of getting lost among the boulders. The bay’s wind was cold and biting, but that didn’t bother her anymore. When exhaustion did catch up with her, she slumped, and slid back against a rock. Her gaze settled towards the city across the water, and the bright moon that hung above it.

Softly, in Chinese, she called for Snowball. After a few minutes, the robot drifted towards her, lazily down the rocky shore, then more urgently when it saw her face. When it got close, Mei wrapped her arms around it, drew her knees up, and pressed her forehead to its cold, glass casing. Snowball tried to coo at her, make her feel better. She knew it was wrong, but she wouldn’t have the courage to apologize to McCree tonight. 

Maybe she didn’t have the courage for any of this after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Later that evening:
> 
> Junkrat: ...and she said my kit looked nice and she looked like she had a right fever and she just about ran out. All in a dark closet! Haha what a strange bird.
> 
> Roadhog: …
> 
> Roadhog: *puts down tea cup*
> 
> Junkrat: I think she wanted to be my friend.
> 
> Roadhog: *INTERNALLY ROARING*
> 
> Roadhog: Jamison.
> 
> Junkrat: Wot?
> 
> \--- 
> 
>  
> 
> Hanzo: You need to come inside.
> 
> McCree, rolling around on the ground in the loading bay: Why should I? Why bother? 
> 
> Hanzo: I will kill her later, if that pleases you. But now, you will catch a cold. 
> 
> McCree: The cold doesn't matter, not to some 'mean, dusty ol' bully' like me! Why not stay out here, forever, wrapped in the warmth of my so-called ugly red blanket?
> 
> Hanzo: I thought she called it an ‘old, soiled picnic blanket’. 
> 
> McCree: ;__________________;
> 
> Hanzo: ...I’ll bring out some tea.


End file.
